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[RESOLVED] Learning JS after Flash/AS3

Hi Guys,

Sorry if this has been asked my search didn't turn up anything sensible. My question is a broad one about which direction I should be headed as a novice flash developer looking to move to HTML5/CSS/JS. So I lived on this ship for a few months last year and had to keep myself entertained during down time, I painfully taught myself AS3.0 from the documentation supplied with Flash (with no internet connection at sea ), and made a game based around Box2D Flash physics engine. I showed a friend who works for Google and he suggested I re-write it in JS then get it going on mobile devices, with the likes of PhoneGap etc... It looks like I'll end up back on a ship for a while so... I've done a bit of looking around and I think I've got my head around using Box2DWeb (A JS port) and EaselJS to do most of what I was doing as far as scripting goes, my main question actually is about drawing and animating.

What illustrating program would someone suggest to one who is competent with the flash drawing environment? I'd like to be able to trace photos with a line tool then fill gaps with colours/gradients etc, basic cartoon drawing. I tried Inkscape and it just doesn't make sense, fills within strokes have a separate stroke line (a fill with a stroke inside a stroke?), deleted lines leave holes, every click seems to be a separate object - I liked how flash combined lines/fills of the same RGB value into one selectable item that you could manipulate as if drawn all at once. I'd also like to be able to frame-by-frame animate some of it and I get how to do this with EaselJS if I have a PNG file with multiple sprites within it but how does one go about producing the sprites? At this stage I'm thinking I will just do it in Flash and export the drawings as PNG, build them into a PNG with Inkscape or something? Though I'm sure this will be frowned on?

Apologies if this is in the wrong place I guess it is probably not a scripting question. Illustrations aside if anybody has any advice for EaselJS or alternate libraries for doing what I'm doing I'd appreciate it. I think I've got my head around prototypes rather than classes for example - any mindsets a flash developer might be stuck on like this too.

If you are going to be without internet then I suggest that you get XAMPP which will give you a localized web server for trialing your builds in your web browser on your laptop device.

XAMPP will give you a Windows set up of an Apache web server, Mysql and PHP as well as other bits you may need.

Get a copy of ECMA Script which will give you all you need in Javascript code to use in your build and you might want to have a look at HTML.

Editors are a personal choice, I use Notepad++ among other editors.

Also get a few stock photos, media and audio together for you to use as doing stuff offline and not having anything to pad out a web build with can be annoying.

STOP using $ prefix on JavaScript variable names...
Please remember to wrap any code you have in forum tags:- [CODE]...[/CODE] [HTML]...[/HTML] [PHP]...[/PHP]If you can't think outside the box, you will be trapped forever with no escape...

Thanks for the reply I've got most of the media I need - the ship deal may not be happening now I will have internet if that's the case. Got a little better at using Inkscape it's a little advanced for what I really need to be doing but nevermind it will work. I'll close this here and come back if I need anything sorry to ask such a simple question...
Thanks heaps
Josh